The Weitz Brothers Branch Out

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Two very different literary adaptations somehow eluded Scott Rudin’sgreedy clutches and landed in the lap of American Pie writer/director/producers Chris and Paul Weitz. Chris Weitz has begun filming as both writer and director of The Golden Compass (IMDb), the first installment of Philip Pullman’sHis Dark Materials trilogy (Tom Stoppard, who did the initial drafts of the script, also gets a writer credit). The film has grand expectations, as New Line Cinema has bestowed upon it its most generous budget since Lord of the Rings. The cast includes Nicole Kidman, Daniel Craig (the blonde Bond), and Ian McShane, with newcomer Dakota Blue Richards playing the lead role. You may remember that Weitz angered fans of the book when he declared that the adaptation would avoid any mention of God and religion because, well, this is America, and in America, we don’t mix God and Nicole Kidman.

The other Weitz brother, Paul, is hard at work on his adaptation of Nick Flynn’s memoir Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (IMDb). The first order of business, I imagine, is neutering the title to something like, “Another Totally Awful Night in Really Bad City”? Or maybe just “Suck City”? Just a hunch.

(Update, Max adds: Reuters is now reporting that video games based on the His Dark Materials films are on the way.)

Patrick Brown
is a staff writer for The Millions. Patrick has worked in the book business for over seven years, including a two-year stint as the webmaster and blogger for Vroman's Bookstore. He is currently the Community Manager for Goodreads.com. He's written book reviews for Publishers Weekly, and he's spoken about books and the internet at the LA Times Festival of Books, the Southern California Independent Booksellers Association spring meetings, and the 140 Characters Conference. He writes the sporadically entertaining Tumblr blog The Feeling.

Want Not craves pride of place with such “sprawling” novels of social commentary as Infinite Jest and Freedom. Surprisingly, though, it turns out not to be a didactic story about reducing, reusing, and recycling. It may be just the opposite, a subversive argument that we are focusing our attention on the wrong sort of waste.

Quinn Dalton's recent collection Bulletproof Girl contains eleven stories about women in peril. Not physical peril in the tied to the railroad tracks "save me Indiana Jones" way, but social and emotional peril. Each story is a snapshot, a day or two in the life of a woman who has come up against something in her life that is big and hard to move. My favorite story was "Lennie Remembers the Angels" about an elderly woman who is paranoid about her neighbors but turns a blind eye to her son's transgressions. There is a physicality to her language in this story: damp heat, dark apartments and overpowering food smells. Like "Lennie," several of the stories in the collection could be mistaken for chapters in a novel; they aren't self-contained. Dalton is very good at fleshing out her characters, and we know their individual histories. As she leads her protagonists through their hard times, we are given stories that are as character-driven as they are plot-driven. The long title story broadens the themes the Dalton explores in the rest of the collection. Instead of one woman, we have three: Emery, May and Celeste, three generations from the same family, all at difficult crossroads and alternately comforting and pitying one another. Emery is smarting from the loss of her boyfriend, her mother May has been driven to odd obsessive behavior ever since her husband moved out, and old Celeste the grandmother is vibrant, but will not sympathize with her daughter, and instead takes them all on a macabre errand.See also: Scott's review and his interview with Dalton

If, according to the Grey Lady, soccer is now “the go-to sport of the thinking class,” you’ll want to brush up on your footy knowledge before the World Cup begins on June 12. Fortunately, there are a number of books that examine politics and culture through the optic of the beautiful game. David Winner’sBrilliant Orange traces the Dutch soccer team’s penchant for self-destruction to the country’s Calvinist culture, while Franklin Foer’sHow Soccer Explains the World describes the successes and failures of globalization by looking at soccer clubs and their communities, both local and global. Most recently, Soccernomics, by Simon Kuper and Stefan Szymanski, uses data judiciously (ahem, FiveThirtyEight) to challenge our conventional beliefs about both club and national sides. And the most literary of the bunch, Eduardo Galeano’sSoccer in Sun and Shadow, waxes poetic about the history of soccer, starting in China five thousand years ago. Lucky for the true footy intellectual, a new addition to this repertoire of soccer nonfiction has arrived just in time for the World Cup.
Dave Zirin’sBrazil’s Dance with the Devil: the World Cup, the Olympics, and the Struggle for Democracy is a formidable, if flawed, entry into this canon. To be sure, this book is more about Brazilian economic, social, and political history than soccer. In particular, Zirin’s book attempts to capture in nonfiction what its counterparts in the novel (Roberto Bolaño’s2666) and cinema (Amores Perros) have already dramatized, that is, the matrix of structural violence, political corruption, and income inequality that, according to some, has attended the rise of neoliberalism in Latin America around the turn of this century. These networks of violence are often difficult to discern and distill for the average reader precisely because these are processes and systems at work -- in fact, such a task is probably better suited to fiction than nonfiction -- but Zirin makes a valiant effort to connect the dots. In Brazil’s Dance with the Devil, he explains the unrest in Brazil in advance of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics with the anger, erudition, and clarity we have come to expect from his sports columns for The Nation. On occasion, however, Zirin is blinded by his own zeal for the subject and fails to consider opposing viewpoints or other causal factors.
Central to the book’s thesis is Zirin’s idea of the “neoliberal trojan horse.” But before we get to that, we should unpack what neoliberalism -- a term often bandied about without much explanation -- actually means. Generally attributed to Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the term has evolved over time and today is deployed primarily as a pejorative by critics of laissez-faire economics. Neoliberalism prizes individual freedom over government interference, regulation, and labor unions. “The assumption that individual freedoms are guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking,” writes David Harvey in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Somewhat dubiously to the Left, this philosophy holds that economic benefits will “trickle down” to the poor, though according to Harvey, “the process of neoliberalism has, however, entailed much ‘creative destruction’, not only of prior institutional frameworks and powers…but also of divisions of labor, social relations...ways of life.” In his account of neoliberalism’s origins, Zirin attempts to explain how an economic philosophy whose “top priorities include crushing unions, privatizing health care and education, abolishing worker protections like safety rules and the minimum wage, and removing environmental protections” became ubiquitous today.
This section on neoliberalism should be one of the book’s most important and elucidating, and yet it leaves something to be desired. Readers are left wondering -- at the very least -- what those in favor of neoliberal policy found attractive about it in the first place (i.e. promoting economic growth). In fact, neoliberalism in a different context has also described a more moderate form of liberalization; for example, the Third Way under Tony Blair and Bill Clinton aspired to deregulate and rely on the market -- instead of the government -- to solve problems. Zirin's critiques may very well be on point, but if he more explicitly linked neoliberal policy to the points he makes on surveillance, inequality, and education in Brazil, he would have created a more textured portrait of the structures responsible for shaping the country as it is today.
That said, let’s consider his basic argument. Leaning on Naomi Klein’s “shock doctrine,” Zirin asserts that large-scale events like the Olympics and the World Cup -- the “neoliberal trojan horses” -- offer countries like Brazil the perfect opportunity to install neoliberal economic policies that their publics would otherwise never authorize. “Nobody wins elections by promising to turn the country into a sweatshop zone,” says Zirin. “So in order to get neoliberal policies in place, the world’s elite need a strategy -- some clever sleight of hand.”
This legerdemain lies in what former soccer player turned academic Jules Boykoff has called “celebration capitalism.” Quoting Boykoff, Zirin argues that massive, international sporting events like the World Cup offer the state a “‘once-in-a-generation opportunity [for police and military forces] to multiply and militarize their weapons stocks, laminating another layer on to the surveillance state. The Games justify a security architecture to prevent terrorism, but that architecture can double to suppress or intimidate acts of political dissent.’” And what happens after the Games are over? What are those drones that hovered over the 2012 Olympics in Great Britain doing now?
More disturbingly for Zirin, events like World Cup and the Olympics also allow governments to justify the eviction of their cities’ poorest residents. Zirin describes how Brazilian authorities have used the World Cup as a pretext to clear out the favelas in Rio de Janeiro that occupy prime real estate. He isn’t merely pontificating from his armchair, either: Zirin takes us into the cities, and while taking care not to romanticize their poverty, he humanizes the struggle for resistance by speaking with both residents and scholars. These are among the strongest moments of the book.
These favela evictions take on a more sinister dimension when one realizes that most of those being kicked out are Brazilians of African descent. “In 2014, when the official line is that race is ‘not an issue,’” writes Zirin, “it is the descendants of slaves who...live shorter lives, make less money, have more difficulty finding employment, and are more likely to be among the ten thousand people killed by police over the course of the last decade.” For Zirin, neoliberalism systemically attempts to efface poor, dark-skinned Brazilians who live in favelas.
In the book’s last chapter, Zirin reminds us of Brazil’s failure to deliver new schools and hospitals of the same “FIFA-quality” as the stadiums being built in a country already filled with them. More infuriatingly, most of these stadiums will be empty or severely underused after the World Cup. “One idea,” Zirin notes regarding the post-World Cup function of a $325 million stadium constructed in the middle of the Amazon Rainforest, “is to turn the entire stadium into a massive, open-air prison -- a use with a notoriously bloody echo in Latin American history, one not lost on those protesting the priorities of both FIFA and the Brazilian government.”
Zirin’s points on heightened surveillance, favela evictions, and inadequate schools in the run up to the World Cup are valid on their own; however, he lumps them together under the banner of general neoliberal evil, and this is somewhat misleading. A surveillance state in a World Cup or Olympic city, for example, could have emerged just as easily under a different type of economy or government -- more drones and greater security at the World Cup are not necessarily unique or attributable to neoliberal policy. It is also arguable that the excesses of state capitalism -- not neoliberalism -- are responsible for the chaos in Brazil, but Zirin seldom entertains alternative theories. Throughout the book, Zirin takes shots at The Economist and the Financial Times for their stances on neoliberal policy, but in the future he might consider their arguments with greater intellectual empathy in order to provide a more objective analysis of views other than his -- if only so that he can offer a more comprehensive and compelling refutation of them.
Describing structural violence and complex economic theory in accessible, stylish, and substantive prose -- while simultaneously weaving in Brazil’s social and sporting history -- is an extremely difficult enterprise. Few books can pull off such a feat, and for this Brazil’s Dance with the Devil deserves commendation. Its yellow card on the issue of neoliberalism notwithstanding, this book will be an essential companion for any member of the “thinking class” who wants to approach the World Cup protests with a critical gaze.

Which is better?Reading a series slowly, savoring each book by separating it from its ilk, dividing and conquering and drawing the series out over the span of several years, as if reading them real time the way they were released.Or...Devouring a series at once, going from book to book as if the separate entities were truly one bound volume, not allowing the characters to rest but letting them progress, from their early days until their final words.I used to be in the former.Now I'm in the latter.This sudden change of heart is thanks, in most part, to this month's Book of the Month - John Updike's Rabbit Angstrom: The Four Novels. Or, as most know it: Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.Breaking away from my typical pattern, where I found myself reading one book, then steering away for a while until coming back to the next in the series (see: Roddy Doyle'sHenrybooks and the Lord of the Rings trilogy), I decided to read all of these books at once. I came to this decision in two parts.First, I had to actually decide to read one of the Rabbit books. I did it in order to see what the big deal was about. So I asked around. I had heard from several people that Rabbit Redux was the best of the four. I found out that the final two books won the Pulitzer. That left three of the four books with a decent pedigree. Then, I thought, "Well, if I was going to read the last three, shouldn't I start with the first one?" In days, I had created a viable argument for reading each one of the four books.Second, at Common Good Books in St. Paul (Garrison Keillor's great little basement bookstore), I made a grand discovery. Having never looked for any of these Updike books before, I never realized they had been published together. They had been. It was reportedly the way Updike had meant to have them published after finishing the fourth installment: as Rabbit Angstrom. The collection shed its four names and took the name of its protagonist, the utterly despicable yet strangely endearing man from Brewer, Pennsylvania.With that, I found my mind made up for me. I'd just read all of them.So I did. And here's what I found.1. Reading a set of books like this keeps everything fresh. Nothing is missed. Vague remembrances to scenes in past books are still top-of-mind, making every allusion memorable. You also start to see patterns more readily. There's no time taken trying to figure out where a character or an odd turn of phrase, or a symbol or reference to earlier foreshadowing first appeared. You know. You encountered it just a few days prior.2. In completing the set, I discovered I intimately knew everything about the character - more than any character I've ever encountered. And I have to believe that, if read apart, I wouldn't have made all of the connections. I wouldn't have been able to predict what Rabbit was going to do. It would have been impossible - I'd have spent part of my brain thinking back to whether an event was worth remembering, not processing each flaw, each trait.3. I saw each character grow, amazingly, over a thirty year period, in a way that only a 1,500 page novel can do.The Rabbit books are pretty simple, actually - just the chronicle of one man's life over thirty years, each book taking place ten years after the one before it. It's, to use the overused Rabbit cliche, a series about an "Everyman." It's the tale of Everyman's rise from dirt to riches, complete with all of the warts - the infidelities, the misguided choices, death, life, hate, family relations, everything that makes real life interesting.I know. I know. Many actually find the Rabbit novels to be very uninteresting. Many find Updike to be a little too pretentious, especially in these books. Many find these to be boring, unnecessary trifles that have done no more than elevate Updike to a literary position he may not deserve.I liked them. I liked them because, over the course of the four books, I truly got to know Harry Angstrom. I knew what he was going to do, felt his every pain and struggle. When he was in the hospital, I developed a sympathy chest pain. When he was watching his home burn down, I was smelling fire in the distance. When he hurt, or was hurt, I wanted it to stop - I wanted to do something to steer the characters in the right direction, to grab them by the shoulders and remind them of what had happened in the past - where the destructive nature was going to lead, why they were making mistakes that they should have learned from in years past.I enjoyed the decade-wide time capsules and the growth of the characters and the references to past seemingly inconsequential events. And Updike, despite all that he did to make Rabbit Angstrom completely sex-crazed at times, is a great writer. You've got to hand him that.So yeah, I tended to grasp the characters emotionally. In everyday life, I'd find things that reminded me of Harry Angstrom, simply because he seemed so real - so ordinary and so knowable.I'm not sure I'd have had the same effect if I read them spread out over a long time. I'm not sure I'd have even finished the collection. But I'm sure glad I did.Corey Vilhauer - Black Marks on Wood PulpCVBoMC 2006, 2007: Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr.

This guest contribution comes from Kevin Hartnett. Hartnett lives in Philadelphia with his fiance. After graduating from college in 2003, he joined Teach For America and taught sixth grade in the Bronx for two years. He enjoys politics and travel and writing about both.In early 1938, at the behest of the Vatican, Graham Greene traveled to Mexico to report on the anti-Catholic initiatives of President Lázaro Cárdenas. The Lawless Roads, his account of that trip, opens with a disclaimer: "This is the personal impression of a small part of Mexico at a particular time, the spring of 1938," he writes. "Time proved the author wrong in at least one of his conclusions - the religious apathy in Tabasco was more apparent than real." During his visit Greene pronounced the situation calm, but only a month later the peasantry erupted into violenceThe reliability of the narrator is a central issue in any book, but particularly a travel story where the author by definition treads in unfamiliar waters. As a colonial era Brit come to Mexico, possessing limited Spanish and a meager tolerance for the food, Greene appears at first to be a tenuous interpreter. On his way down the Gulf coast to Mexico City, he remarks with a breezy confidence on the "sexual impertinence" of a young maid and the "sensual" look on an indigenous girl's face, and later levels an incurious verdict against the character of his guide. "He had a feeling of responsibility," Greene writes, "and no Mexican cares for that."But there is also a measure of hesitation in Greene's voice. 1938 is worlds removed from 1838, and Greene is not the obstreperous H.M. Stanley stepped boldly into Africa. He acknowledges early on the caveat familiar to anyone who has ever written an email home from a foreign country. "The danger of the quick tour," he writes, "[is that] you miscalculate on the evidence of three giggling girls and a single Mass, and malign the devotion of thousands." While Greene has some of the cocksure colonialist in him, he's just as much a modern pilgrim, approaching his journey with epistemological caution and an awareness of how far he is from home.The heart of Greene's journey is a rugged trek through the remotest parts of Chiapas. He makes his way by barge, prop plane and mule back and often arrives at the next town well after dark, when all the locals have claimed sleeping spots for the night and only the floor remains. Greene rarely misses an opportunity to comment on his discomfort - the heat, the cold, the beetles, the food - but what he does is more important than what he says, and it's hard not to admire the lengths to which he goes to get from place to place. When a rainstorm prevents a plane from landing to take him to Las Casas, he hires a team of mules instead. The trip takes three days over an undulating, spiraling track through the mountains. Greene writes of the constant way he exhorted his beast, "After nine hours I began to feel that the words 'Mula. Mula. Echa, mula' were graven on my brain forever." Greene fails to gain any real insight into the religious situation in Mexico, but that aspect of his trip becomes almost beside the point. The book is sustained by the adventure along the way, and the honest, personal way he describes it.1938 was of course a momentous year in world history. German troops annexed Austria nearly the same week that Greene began his trek through Chiapas, and while he does not dwell on the events in Europe, his writing is accented with premonitions of change. Arriving in a small village high up in the central plateau, Greene encounters an expatriated German "who kept a tiny photographic store." Looking around, Greene notes the torn covers of magazines decorating the walls and "among them, rigidly, the face of Hitler." As Greene makes his way through the mountains there is a feeling, particularly with seventy years of hindsight, that this journey is the last of its kind. Europe was set to burn and the jaunty colonial prerogative would not survive the war, to be replaced as it were by the ambiguous opium haze that Greene later described in The Quiet American.But as Greene goes along, recording his impressions of Mexico and complaining about the bulbous mosquitoes, he seems already to have a foot in the remade world. Reading Trollope, he grows momentarily homesick for London, missing his bookshelves and chairs and the buses going by on the street. But he snaps out of it and reminds himself, "it wasn't real: this was real - the high empty room and the tiled and swarming floor and the heat and the sour river smell." The genocide in Europe and the horror of Hiroshima ushered in a long postmortem skepticism, which challenged our claims to know much of anything about the world. Greene shakes his head free of Trollope in favor of what is right in front of him, and while a hot and swarming floor might not explain Mexico, it's true to what he saw and better than any fanciful alternative.The result is a precise, modest book that does not try to explain more than it can. At the celebration of a saint's birthday in a small town, Greene observes a fireworks display. "A Catherine wheel whirled in the road," he writes, "and the rockets hissed up into the sky and burst in flippant and trivial stars." It is a small moment, over almost as soon as it began, and yet one that lingers where a more percussive racket might have been forgotten already. I would say the same of The Lawless Roads.

In 1996, guerrilla leaders and Guatemalan government officials met in Guatemala City to sign a peace accord. After 36 years, the longest war in Latin American history came to an end. The Guatemalan Civil War officially began in 1960, but essentially in 1954, after the CIA -- acting on the business interests of Boston-owned United Fruit Company -- orchestrated a coup of the country’s first democratically-elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. For the next three and a half decades, a series of dictators ruled Guatemala with the support of the United States government.
A U.N. report published after the war’s end suggested that more than 200,000 people were killed in Guatemala between 1960 and 1996. Government forces were responsible for 91 percent of these deaths; 83 percent of those killed were indigenous Mayans. Actions taken by the military against the Mayan people during José Efraín Ríos Montt’s 16-month regime, from 1981 to 1983, were retroactively declared a genocide. After the report aired, then-President Bill Clinton delivered a formal apology on behalf of previous administrations, but offered no material reparation.
In a 2006 interview, historian Stephen Schlesinger, author of Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, said flatly: “the legacy of Guatemala is sheer horror, and something the U.S. cannot be forgiven for.”
The story of Guatemala’s Civil War has been told in nonfiction accounts rendered by academics, in the testimony of survivors and activists like Rigoberta Menchú; and in a few novels. The facts of the war’s atrocities aren’t hidden anymore. Neither is the story of the United States' sustained support of governments that tortured and murdered their own people. Though individual books have been lauded for their formal achievements, brave testimony, or astute analysis, Guatemala’s story, like so many others, never seems to gain enough traction to generate actual consequences for war criminals, Guatemalan and American alike. It’s a story that slips out of the stream of American public conversation, just as soon as it is acknowledged.
Enter Kelly Kerney’s second novel, Hard Red Spring. In a robust 400 or so pages, the novel spans the 20th century, reimagining critical moments in Guatemala’s history from the perspectives of four American women. Whether in Guatemala by association or by choice, each protagonist arrives in the country with hope for a fresh start. Gradually, moments of doubt pierce holes in self-perpetuated innocence. At last the stories these women tell themselves -- about their own good intentions or the charitable cause of the United States or their church -- give way to the weight of unassailable truths. Each character must confront both her entrapment and her culpability.
Hard Red Spring is an ambitious project. Meticulously researched and written over the course of a decade, it not only retells a century of Guatemala’s history, but dramatizes it -- a twinned labor specific to historical fiction. Kerney’s real daring, however, lies in her novel’s emotional aim. She has crafted a story and a set of characters that require her readers to look squarely at what Americans -- especially white Americans, the demographic most comfortable in the United States’ myth of moral superiority -- will do to maintain our innocence, and what we will do, and have done, in the face of guilt.
Kerney brings us, for instance, into a university in the United States where history is defined as anything that occurred at least 20 years in the past. The distinction exists to keep class material from becoming political. This means a professor lecturing on the history of Guatemala cannot yet discuss the Reagan administration’s funding of José Efraín Ríos Montt’s 16-month regime -- the bloodiest epoch in Guatemala’s Civil War.
In a campus bar, a group of undergraduate students react to their professor’s denunciation of United States foreign policy. “If she has a problem with how we do things, she should leave,” offers one student, though the comment is met by embarrassed silence from her peers. “Is self-hatred the only way we can be saved?” another boy asks seriously. “Because that’s all I’ve learned in that class. Self-hatred. If I wrote my final paper on everything I hated about myself I’d get an A.” Caught between scripts of conservative rebuff and liberal apology, the students lack adequate tools to grapple with the meaning of their country’s moral crimes, and what action they might take to counteract them.
Meanwhile U.S. missionaries, NGO workers, and doctors stationed in Guatemala doubt whether they’re helping anyone at all. A doctor from the United States explains his predicament to Lenore, a missionary.
'It’s the babies,' he said. 'I came here to help the babies, but now I don’t think I’m helping'...His expert tone shifted, so that he sounded like an ordinary man. 'Sometimes it seems if I weren’t here, they wouldn’t be either.'
In such moments, Kerney highlights a dearth of language in the United States to address the web of connection and implication -- borne out of an imperial and now neoliberal global marketplace -- that distorts any of our well-intentioned actions into a reinforcement of systems of power.
Hard Red Spring gathers momentum as it progresses. The novel’s opening section, set in 1902, lacks a distinct atmospheric feeling of that time period, and occasionally stalls during passages of overwritten dialogue. But as the story moves into more recent decades, its prose grows robust with sharply-imagined detail. The weave of the plot tightens, and building suspense makes for a gripping read. Kerney is at her best in her wry observations of her characters, and in the many masterfully concise one-line quotations offset into the mouths of her secondary characters.
It’s important to note that Kerney has written a novel not only about the Guatemalan Civil War, but specifically about women ensnared in the machinery of that war. She shows us the entrapment of indigenous Mayan women in a system meant to strip them of everything: their dignity, their families, their bodies, and their lives. And she defines the cramped boundaries of power inhabited by more privileged Hispanic and white American women.
The novel’s most sinister characters are its most self-assured men. Even so, Kerney maintains a standard of grim humanity in depicting all of her characters. Men who commit murder have flashes of vulnerability or sensitive insight. Deeply traumatized Mayan women beat an unarmed and -- relatively -- innocent missionary to death. There is no redemption here, only complication, and a thin cry for empathy for those on either end of horrific acts.
Hard Red Spring completes its story in 1999, over 20 years removed from the present day. Meanwhile, the Guatemalan Mayan community continues to fight against multinational corporations, over land use and the extreme forms of violence and intimidation used to evict Mayan people from their homes. In 2013, domestic protest succeeded in forcing the cancellation of the Monsanto Law, a provision of the 2005 CAFTA-DR agreement that would have monopolized Guatemala’s agricultural processes and threatened food sovereignty.
Neighboring countries also affected by the CAFTA-DR agreement -- Nicaragua, El Salvador, Honduras, Costa Rica, and the Dominican Republic -- face similar aggression from private interest groups -- foreign and domestic alike. Earlier this month, renowned Honduran activist Berta Cáceres was shot dead in her home, after her years-long opposition to the construction of hydroelectric dams on indigenous property. Don’t let the novel’s end in the '90s deceive you -- the injustices, moral confusion, and power dynamics on display in Hard Red Spring carry through into today’s world.
Over the course of the novel’s 100-year span, a Mayan folktale emerges as a symbolic link between narrative threads. In it, a deer and a jaguar decide, separately, to build their own houses. Passing like ships in the night, they accidentally help each other to build the same structure, and on its completion decide to live in the house together. As time passes the two animals grow fearful of one another. One night there is a sharp noise. Startled, the jaguar and the deer flee in opposite directions, and never return.
The first time this folktale appears in Kerney’s novel, nine-year-old Evie Crowder is nonplussed. She’s accustomed to stories, like the tortoise and the hare, that resolve neatly into allegories.
'That’s all?' Evie had asked.
'What else? That is everything,' Ixna told her.
Hard Red Spring is not a neat or comforting story either -- it’s not built for that. It’s built to explore the truth.

Infrequent Millions contributor Buzz Poole has written for numerous publications and is the author of Madonna of the Toast. He is also the proprietor of a blog by the same name.The scene: an all-night, drug-fueled party. We could be in New York, London, Berlin or Buenos Aires, until the host turns down the music, telling revelers "Be quiet, or we won't be able to hear it - it should be coming now!" People laugh knowingly and accuse the host of being disrespectful, but then at 5 a.m. comes the Azan, the first call to prayer:A high-pitched male voice, singing in Arabic, soars through the air. The crowd begins to cheer, whistle and clap. Then the music is turned back up and the party continues.Such is life on the Persian hip-hop scene - one of the many examples of how the global influences of the 21st century have fused with tradition in Iran.Transit Tehran: Young Iran and Its Inspirations provides myriad ways to trace the contradictions and dichotomies that define contemporary Iran, especially in Tehran. Fiction, nonfiction, photography, film stills, paintings and illustrations speak to every aspect of the capital's 14 million residents, while also exploring the burden that artists bear as "cultural agents to the West," in the words of contributor Shirin Neshat. These potent and incisive creative acts and cultural investigations are complicated by the current government's imposing role in controlling the flow of information in and out of the country. But it is not only the Islamic Republic that has used authoritarian tactics to maintain power over its people. Transit Tehran presents Islam as just one of many aspects of the country today, reaching back to Persian history, kings, shahs, the influence of foreign governments and oil.Many of the stories and studies in this book hinge on the dilemma of change without change, which according to Neshat dates back to the nineteenth century. "[T]he tragedy of Iran seems to repeat itself, with no escape," he writes, in an appreciation of the exiled illustrator Aredeshir Mohassess. Living in New York since 1976, Mohassess is considered "the most significant living Iranian artist to date... almost entirely forgotten by both the Iranian and the Western public." The strength of Mohassess's work, as Neshat sees it, is that it "facilitates an understanding of the modern political history of Iran, from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries: a history that proves to be overwhelmingly dark and authoritarian." Of the black ink samplings of Mohassess's illustrations in Transit Tehran, chains figure heavily, rendering forced servitude, almost always at the hands of government figures. But just as this work alludes to a bloody history of exploitation, the resilient and revolutionary spirit of the people is celebrated with macabre humor. The illustration "The king is always above the people," for example, comprises a group of modest men, with their king strung up above them.Khosrow Hassanzadeh's series of paintings "Guys in the Hood," inspired by his desire "to remind people that although the Revolution happened, in many ways, beneath the surface, nothing changed," features such modest men. His subjects are his neighbors, who enjoy long-standing pastimes like waterpipes, wrestling and chai. Proud, assured faces define these portraits, which derive from martyrs' portraits and the fact that the "government still says the Iranian people are living martyrs; sixty million people ready to die for their ideology."Women are the focus of several of the pieces in Transit Tehran. Newsha Tavakolian's "Girl Power" photographs convey "one of the many contradictions of life here. The new generation [of women] is completely different from that of their mothers who just ran households." This difference ranges from attending university and running businesses to martyrdom, but even the empowerment generated by these changes does not eradicate the patriarchic reality of the culture at large. "Dragnet Tehran" introduces Iranian policewomen, in existence as trainees since 1966 but only just making their "first official public appearance during the 2006 demonstration on International Women's Day." "Going Home," perhaps the most personal offering in the book, eulogizes the pre-Revolution days when women would wear bathing suits in the Caspian Sea. Javad Montazeri's images of women enjoying a day at the beach and swimming in the hejab were shot for his daughter, who will also have to cover herself when she turns nine years old: "The change that has taken place didn't evolve naturally. It was imposed on us... They altered surface appearances, but people's minds were unaffected."The Western media tends to cover only certain aspects of Iran, creating a perception that these alone define the country. For those of us on the outside looking in, every page of Transit Tehran peels away a layer of misunderstanding and sheds light on the dynamics of Iran and its people.Update: It's been brought to our attention that the Transit Tehran's co-editor, Maziar Bahari, has been imprisoned in Tehran since June 12. PEN issued a letter last week, signed by a who's who of contemporary writers, demanding his release[Images courtesy Garnet Publishing]

Not all books can make us cry and those that do are often so shamefully sentimental that we can’t easily admit to reading them, let alone crying with them. This, however, is not the case with Julian Barnes’sLevels of Life, a novella-length text in three chapters, which produces in its reader tears of the most literary kind.
The book’s first two chapters concern the adventures of a set of nineteenth century figures from England and France: the most popular actress of the time, Sarah Bernhardt, the photographer Gaspard-Félix Tournachon (popularly known as Nadar), and Fred Burnaby, a colonel in the Royal Horse Guards, a cavalry regiment of the British Army. All of those characters are devoted aeronauts and are fascinated by balloons and their machinations. Levels of Life begins in a cheerful mood, with the ascent of the trio from the ground in separate balloons. Some of them are accompanied by bottles of champagne, others by copies of the London Times and all with high hopes of witnessing great landscapes.
Burnaby and his French friends seem to have the best time, clinking their glasses and discussing whether the monarchy or the republic is the better system. Barnes does an excellent job in describing the differences between the aeronautical cultures on two sides of the English Channel. In England the Aeronautical Society’s members include a number of lords and dukes while in France the Societe des aeronautes, founded by Nadar, is more of an artistic society, listing Alexandre Dumas, père et fils, and George Sand among its members.
There are descriptions of the first balloon and the pleasure it brought to aeronauts in the eighteenth century. There are snapshots of accidents and violence, too. A young man dies in Newcastle, falling to earth from “a height of several hundred feet,” his internal organs bursting out on to the ground. Then there are references to ballooning’s cultural significance (according to Nadar the three supreme emblems of modernity are “photography, electricity and aeronautics”) as well as the political hopes it had inspired. Victor Hugo and progressives in France believed that balloons could bring democracy to the world. Barnes doesn’t seem to share their enthusiasm. Aeronautics did not lead to democracy, he jokes, “unless budget airlines count.”
There is an enjoyable portrait of Nadar, “a journalist, caricaturist, photographer, balloonist, entrepreneur and inventor, a keen registerer of patents and founder of companies.” His fascinating life story floats above Victorian history, drifting from one project to another, very much like a balloon. He arises as a man more interested in the vertical than the horizontal. Nadar’s fascination with height and Paris sewers are accompanied by Barnes’s own memories in Paris as a young man.
After “The Sin of Height” and “On The Level,” a rather flat chapter in which Barnes dramatizes the relationship between Burnaby and Bernhardt, we reach “The Loss of Depth.” Here, the cheerful historical figures of the book leave the stage to a couple (Barnes and his wife, the literary agent Pat Kavanagh who died in 2007) who play the tragic last days of their relationship before our eyes. Kavanagh is a co-author of Levels of Life in the sense that it is above all her memory that defines and gives meaning to this text.
Barnes and Kavanagh have loved each other intensely for many decades:
We were together for thirty years. I was thirty-two when we met, sixty-two when she died. The heart of my life; the life of my heart. And though she hated the idea of growing old — in her twenties, she thought she would never live past forty — I happily looked forward to our continuing life together: to things becoming slower and calmer, to collaborative recollection.
Reading this chapter one feels as if the balloon in which they began traveling together all those years ago is now occupied only by the reader and Barnes whose job it is to look at the distance they traveled as a couple. The thirty seven days between the diagnosis of Kavanagh’s illness and her death form the emotional core here, as do Barnes’s experiences of desperation and grief.
It is the abrupt and sudden severing of a relationship that makes Barnes’s prose so unbearably intense. “You put together two people who have not been put together before,” he muses, “then, at some point, sooner or later, for this reason or that, one of them is taken away. And what is taken away is greater than the sum of what was there.”
What was taken from him with Kavanagh’s death had been alluded to in different texts, but in a decisively covert manner. A quick look at some of the titles of Barnes’s most recent books gives a good idea about his experience: Nothing to Be Frightened Of, The Sense of an Ending. Although both of these books have death as their central theme Levels of Life is the first text in which Barnes tries to come to terms with the experience of losing Kavanagh.
In his essay “The Philosophy of Composition” Edgar Allan Poe argued that the death of a beautiful woman is "unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." That Kavanagh is dead and Barnes, a master of the English language and certainly one of the more significant innovators of the English novel, is here to tell the tale of her death, is sufficient to make these recollections poetical. For Barnes, the death of a loved one had become a source of inspiration, however painful that experience might have been. Completed four years after Kavanagh’s death, his recollections reflect not only his ongoing feeling of desperation but also his fascination with the idea of death. It is as if Barnes, who had loved words and his wife more than anything else in the world, had to endure the pain of losing one of his beloved things. This leaves him alone with the other thing: literature.
Levels of Life ends, surprisingly I think, in a light and cheerful note, with the image of France. His devoted readers will know that French culture is one of Barnes’s intellectual passions which, one by one, continue to receive the delicate attention of this unique writer.